Salesforce has a new answer for investors worried about its growth. The company is betting that pairing its customer software with Anthropic's Claude chatbot will make sales teams faster and the stock more attractive.
On Wednesday, the two companies broadened their strategic alliance and introduced "Claudeforce," offering sales professionals a fresh method for retrieving important information directly within Anthropic's Claude chatbot.
It ships with 37 pre-built sales tools, including email drafting and record updating. Salesforce has never before attached its "force" suffix to another company's product name, and the fact that it did so on Wednesday signals how much importance the company is placing behind this deal.
The idea is simple. Instead of jumping between a customer database and a chatbot, a salesperson can work inside Claude and let it pull up the information they need.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called the plugin a first for the industry.
"We're delivering a dynamic interface that thinks, reasons, and acts," Benioff said. He told CNBC that this is how all enterprise systems will run in the future.
The plugin is currently in the hands of a small group of pilot customers, with a wider preview launch scheduled for next month. More pre-built skills are expected to arrive later this year.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the partnership marks a shift for his company. He noted that Anthropic has long focused on accelerating its research teams, but this is the first time it has really accelerated its go-to-market efforts within Claude. In plain English, Anthropic is now focused on selling more, not just building more.
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The timing of this announcement matters. Salesforce shares have fallen approximately 22% this year following a 20% decline in 2025. By contrast, the Nasdaq has gained about 35% since the close of 2024. That gap is a big reason some investors have been whispering about a "SaaSpocalypse," a term for the slowdown hitting software companies that sell subscriptions.
But the market liked what it heard. After the company unveiled the collaboration and posted fiscal second-quarter results that exceeded analyst projections, Salesforce stock jumped 12% in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
Investor Bill Nygren said Salesforce's growth isn't finished, noting that the company is channeling its cash flow into share repurchases. That is a signal that management thinks the stock is cheap.
Anthropic's primary business is selling Claude models and related products to other enterprises, and it has seen remarkable expansion this year. In a late-July investor update, Anthropic said its annualized revenue run rate had reached $65 billion, seven times the pace from a year earlier.
The after-hours rally does not erase the broader concerns. Software companies like Salesforce are facing scrutiny as investors wonder whether AI offerings from firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI might eventually make them obsolete. By tying Claude directly to customer records and sales workflows, Salesforce is trying to show that AI can make its core products stickier and more valuable.
This partnership is a good reminder that the AI trade is not just about the companies that build the models. It is also about the companies that figure out how to use them.
For Salesforce, the deal is a way to show investors it can grow again. For Anthropic, it is a way to get its AI into more businesses without having to build the sales team from scratch. The two companies are betting that combining their strengths will be better for both of them than going it alone.
But the real test will come when the plugin reaches a wider audience next month. For anyone watching the software sector, this is a good example of how the next wave of growth might not look like a new gadget. It might just look like a smarter way to close a deal.
